Young males have one
thing in mind-eating
A whale's tail seen from
the side does a slick job of
impersonating a sea serpent
before an audience of click
ing humans in New Zealand
waters. One of the prime
whale-watching locales in
the world, the cold waters off
Kaikoura, site of a former
whaling station, support
some 80 sperms, almost all
of them males in their mid
teens to mid-twenties.
Although they are sexually
mature, or close to it, they
are not yet socially mature,
a development that seems
to occur in middle age. Such
maturity signals a male's
readiness to undertake the
long journey to warmer
waters to mate.
According to research by
Stephen Dawson and Elisa
beth Slooten of the University
of Otago in Dunedin, New
Zealand, males come here to
feed in an offshore canyon. It
is not a clubby scene; males
rarely interact, either on the
surface or at hunting depths
of 1,500 to 5,000 feet.
Aggression between young
males seems nonexistent.
Though the New Zealand
males are enormous ani
mals, averaging 35 to 45
feet in length, often all that's
seen of them is their rumpled
backs with the distinctive
asymmetrical blowhole on
the left tip of the forehead
(right). Beneath the blowhole
is the whale's powerful
sound-making mechanism,
a pair of lips that clap
together when the animal
blows air through them. Such
is the force generated that
the sounds can be heard five
miles away.
NationalGeographic, November 1995